I bought 3 of them for $7 each. I built 1 so far. They are pretty junky little low performance rigs, but they do in fact work. Hook them to a good antenna, be prepared to send out a lot of CQ's, expect to hear local AM radio stations, and don't expect glowing signal reports, either strength or audio. I got mine with the intention of modifying them just for fun, (input receive and output transmit filters, higher RF output, 2 or 3 watts, a couple of switched crystals for wider freq range, etc.) Then I figured I'd give them to new General Class hams to play with, but I'd keep 1 and plug my Vibroplex Zephyr into it, take a couple of pictures and work some stations, and tell my contacts I was running a brand new $7 rig with an antique $250 key. :)
I built Pixies for about all of the HF ham bands. 80 meters puts out almost a watt, 10 meters about .25 watt. Sensitivity threshold is about -15dbm. The output transistor doubles as a diode product detector in receive. I haven't made any contacts with any of them yet, but I'm still working on that.
I'll hazard a guess the filter network is inadequate if one wants a legal transmitter. Would be fun to do a FFT or put it on a spectrum analyzer to find out how far out of whack it is.
Nice to see you have the little Tek scope in the 503 chassis on the bench...and not forgotten ... I wonder if the Pixie receiver is sensitive enough...? It seems like the signal generator can't go down to microvolt levels... I was thinking you would have connected an antenna....and CQed ... What a cute little simple rig... Merry Christmas... 73 Kind regards Fred
I am building one, so yet to find out about the harmonics. The RU-vidr, Radio Prepper built one; the harmonics were so strong his WSPR report looked like he was operating on several bands at the same time! Good for a learner like me to build. Thanks for the video and season's greetings to you and yours.
Thank you for the video. It is a nice piece of equipment but I think there are a lot of 40m transceivers around. What might be even more impressive is the beeper as a non-contact material detector.
Kits are always fun to build, but not if you miss parts. That happens often to me, halve of time I miss or loss a part. :D Maybe you can put some bandpass filtering on the inputs, don't know if that will work, you will know that probably better than me, I'm not HRF guy.
Actually, just going from the face plate, I would say it is a 7032 kelvin hertz device. Normally I wait till the end of a video before commenting, but it always kills me when a manufacturer screws up on the SI units - lay persons I get, but if you're going to market something, get it right. Or maybe they did and the actual operating operating frequency is adjusted by changing the ambient temperature. If nominal room temperature is 20 deg C, that is 293.15 K (kelvin). So the frequency presumably would be 7032 * 293.15 K * 1 Hz = 2,061,430.8 Hz. To get it to operate down at 7032 kHz (kilo hertz) you would need to operate the device in a 0.29315 K environment or just above absolute zero. Now I used to work with amplifiers operated in a cryogenic environment that was typically 17 to 19 K but this device doesn't strike me at first blush as being designed to withstand such an environment. So, my first impression, that they've mislabeled the device, is probably the correct one.
OK I can play pedantics too! line1: kelvin and hertz must be capitalized line6: kelvin must be capitalized line9: hertz must be capitalized we must idolize those scientific giants by remembering to capitalize their names, whether abbreviated in SI units or used in common language. All bow down
@@IMSAIGuy Pretty close, I thought that too early on in my career before I got more deeply involved in the SI. When fully spelled out the two units are in lower case, but when only the unit symbol is used it is upper case since the units are named for a person. See www.nist.gov/pml/special-publication-330 and www.nist.gov/pml/special-publication-811. These are U.S. references but you can also see the BIPM SI brochure if you want it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Yeah, waveform looked pretty dirty to me cap in or out. Notice how they give room in the case to build a filter with bigger, better parts. Could have been a nice teaching moment to boot up the DSO and do a a FFT to show how far out of compliance it is built as specified.
Ideally you'd want 2 of these. One for you and the other for the neighbour. That's probebly going to be the maximum range. LOL. It looks great though. :)
Hi, the kit is nice, but the Tek is luxurious 👍, With the Zener diode it is the same as with the LED diode (when I hear it I see red 🤬), recently I explained the abbreviation LED to an "engineer" and what kind of nonsense he actually says when he says LED diode. I also did not understand the established name in the Czech Republic for External TV tuner - Set Top Box I have experienced Zenerka, LEDka, Oscík, etc. Nice day 🙂 Tom
Another foray into pedanticism: People who insist on the use of full (vs truncated names) --- It is ROBERT, not Bob; Katherine, not Kat; William, not Bill or Will; Arthur, not Art, .... A Millenial/Gen Z thing, methinks ....
This is thing with me, too. People often confuse my first name and patronymic (for obv reasons, maybe?), and I don't even say anything because I just want to move on with the conversation rather than correct them, and ultimately, the purpose of the conversation. Someone slamming on the brakes when talking to someone because you accidentally called them "Jon" instead of "Jonathan" is just, well... the opposite of a shortcut.
That's a nice case? ABS sewer plastic, warped,misaligned and PCB for front/back covers. I don't think so, i know it's a kit and all and some might be in to it but it's an embarrassment.
@@ljubomirculibrk4097 Thirteen whole dollars for a working transceiver, educational kit with case... you KNOW someone's gonna whine that it's not nice like an Icom or Yaesu ;)
